Lecture by Dr. Jennifer Allen – Episode 435
In today's presentation, Dr. Jennifer Allen describes transitioning from hospital employee to direct primary care owner and the unexpected income opportunities that followed.
Her experience shows how thoughtful practice design and a small, focused cost center can create new revenue without returning to the grind of traditional clinic work.
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Breaking from the System
Dr. Allen traces her path from nurse and nurse practitioner to family physician, explaining how only a few weeks in an employed role made it clear that productivity targets, insurance rules, and pricing games were undermining real patient care. A cash-pay patient quoted more than $250 for a simple injection that cost pennies crystallized just how misaligned the system had become.
That moment, combined with growing burnout, led her to explore direct primary care (DPC) and negotiate out of her “non-compete” in her employment contract. She then opened an independent membership-based practice where patients pay her directly and she can focus on access, affordability, and providing care rather than insurance metrics.
Designing an Infusion Business
As her DPC panel grew and more patients sought functional and wellness-oriented options, Dr. Allen partnered with an experienced infusion nurse to launch a separate IV infusion lounge under a new LLC. They kept startup costs under $10,000, sourced supplies from national medical and compounding pharmacies, set clear protocols and standing orders, and deliberately chose a brick-and-mortar model that fit their family and lifestyle boundaries instead of chasing mobile work.
With minimal marketing beyond Facebook, banners, and word of mouth, in small nearby towns of 2,000 to 15,000 people, the lounge grew to seeing 10–15 patients a day. The primary services provided were hydration, vitamin infusions, weight loss services, and hormone therapy with low overhead and steadily increasing revenue.
Summary
Dr. Jennifer Allen’s journey illustrates how stepping out of an insurance-based model and adding an IV infusion lounge as a separate business can create both professional satisfaction and a meaningful new income stream, even in smaller communities.
NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.
Links for Today's Episode:
-
- Highlights from the Nonclinical Career Summits (including Dr. Allen's complete presentation and Q&A)
- Dr. Jennifer Allen's DPC Practice
- The Well Medical Infusion Lounge
- Why an Infusion Lounge May Be the Best New Thing
- Rediscover Your Purpose When You Embrace Direct Primary Care
- Nonclinical Career Academy
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Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton
Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 435
How Direct Primary Care Leads To Unexpected Income Opportunities
- Summit Lecture with Dr. Jennifer Allen
John: Dr. Jennifer Allen has a couple of things she can tell us about. And actually she started as a nurse, then she was a family nurse practitioner. Now she's a family physician. And not only does she run her own DPC or direct primary care, I guess is the vernacular. And she can tell us a little bit about that, but she's also a co-owner and partner of the Well Infusion Lounge, which I had no idea what an infusion lounge even was until we had a little podcast interview a while back. So she's going to tell us her story and how this all came to pass and particularly try and fill us in from the doctor's perspective on this idea of an infusion lounge or an infusion center and what those terms mean. And so with that, I will turn it over to you, Dr. Allen.
Dr. Jennifer Allen: John, thank you very much. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me tonight. As John mentioned, I'm a family physician. I'm board certified in family medicine and I've been in practice almost 10 years since residency. When I was a nurse and a nurse practitioner, I had the great fortune to do what we all do in healthcare and help people along the way.
But because I've been doing this for so long, I have seen the change in healthcare and I knew what I was getting into when I went to medical school. But the reality of how difficult the system makes it for us to do our work and feel fulfilled by that really made me look for some different approaches, I guess, to healthcare. And somewhere along the way, I learned about direct primary care, which is simply a different payment model where your patient pays the doctor directly and we don't bill health insurance for that.
And so I learned about that. I thought it was a great idea. I remember actually having this aha moment where I thought, hey, these are my people, because it made so much sense to cut out the middleman, be able to practice in a custom way, in a way that my patients needed.
And then by doing that, making healthcare more affordable. So that's sort of how my journey began into an alternative type of medical practice. Now, I still practice regular medicine.
It's just that my payment model is different and that's an important distinction. So I came out of residency like so many of us do and walked into a guaranteed position and really thought that I was going to be able to be the doctor that I always wanted to be.
And I think it took, I don't know, three weeks, maybe four, for me to realize that, again, this is the system that I was in before.
It wasn't conducive to me really taking care of people and figuring out what was wrong with them and helping people feel better. I felt like I was a tool, really, of big pharma and a tool of the insurance companies. And I just, once you have seen the light in another way, I just couldn't do that.
I really couldn't do it. And it was slowly sucking the life out of me. So I started fantasizing about what it would take to open my own practice and could I really do this direct primary care thing?
And the reality was, the burdens at work continued to build up. And there were a couple of things that happened. One in particular was I had a cash pay patient who needed a trigger point injection.
I went to my office manager to ask her how much was this going to cost for this cash pay patient? And it took her, I don't know, 45 minutes to come back with a number. And she quoted like $256, which for this single mom who had a trigger point and was going to cost me about 32 cents worth of medication in five minutes of my time, $257 might as well have been $2,000.
So what that taught me was, one, never go to the office manager for cash prices when I could just have done the procedure and not even told them and it would have been fine. But that really showed me that I could not continue to practice inside a system that was so bloated and so just not concerned with people feeling better. And so I took steps to do direct primary care.
So about 15 months into a 36 month contract, I went to the board at the hospital and requested to get my license back, which is something that people don't realize when you join a system, they own your license. You can't do anything else while you're employed. And because this was in a small town, and the president of the hospital was knowledgeable enough to recognize that he needed me to stay in the community to be able to feed his hospital, regardless of whether he owned me or not.
He was instrumental in having them void my non-compete so that I could go practice medicine down the street from the hospital in the model of direct primary care. They didn't want me to bill insurance at all. And I was like, okay, because I'm not going to.
And so I was able to open my practice there and started building. And so this segues into the IV infusion lounge, because once you step out of a system and start learning about free market medicine, entrepreneurship, ways to earn more money without necessarily working harder, you start finding out that there's a whole world out there of healthcare that we have not been taught about and are typically not privy to when you're still inside the system. So as a direct primary care doctor, I'm building this practice.
And when you're outside of the system, you tend to attract patients who don't do well in the system either. So either people who don't like the restrictions of health insurance or can't afford health insurance or are just seeking alternative knowledge or alternative information or implementation of healthcare supplements and things like that. And so there's a pretty steep learning curve if you're not in that kind of mindset or functional environment where you're trying to get to the root cause of things.
Now, not everybody in direct primary care has to practice functional medicine or root cause analysis. That just happens to be my personal preference. That's just how I think.
I want to know why something's happening and I want to fix the why. So that's me. But I have plenty of colleagues, plenty of friends who still practice what I would say is more traditional guideline-directed medicine, treating chronic disease and not necessarily focusing on wellness and prevention.
That said, when you have a practice like mine where the patients at times are more knowledgeable about supplements, how to heal with nutrition and things like that, that really pushed me to go learn some more. And so I've been working on my functional medicine certification. It's a long process, there's a lot of information.
But along the way then you have people who start requesting other services. And I had a lot of patients, this was during COVID. I opened my second location right smack dab at the beginning of COVID in 2020, my first location in 2017.
And so people were seeking alternative methods and in order to grow and learn, you have to think outside the box. And so I started looking into vitamin infusions and things like that. And I discovered that there's not a lot of traditional evidence that is research-based, again, like inside the system that we use to filter our information.
But if you go outside of that, IV vitamins and IV nutrition has actually been around for a hundred years. And using nutraceuticals and herbs and things like that, that's the way we did it before commercial industrialized medicine came into play. And so there's a huge bucket of people out there who prefer those newer old methods.
And again, there's a learning curve. So I learned about that, it seemed to make a lot of sense. And during COVID, we had this huge need for people who just needed to be supported with hydration or with some basic vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin D, things like that.
So it really was a great setup for this kind of practice. And basically, I mean, from a business perspective, the reason that we opened the IV infusion center was to keep the cost center separate from the family medicine practice, because it is very different. And in a membership practice, I bundle a lot of things, a lot of care into the membership.
I don't nickel and dime people to death. So I wanted a place where I could have that revenue stream that would be legitimately outside of the membership. From a business perspective, that was really important.
And so I formed a new LLC, and we created the IV infusion center. My co-founder is a nurse, and she had worked in the IV infusion world before. And so she knew all the protocols and had access to that information.
And so together, we continue to learn and dig deep and check on dosing and storage requirements and things for different vitamins. And there are several large commercial pharmacies in the nation who you can order supplies from. And they're FDA-approved compounding pharmacies.
They use legitimate techniques. They're highly regulated. It's all very safe. And so we formed this partnership, and you check your local laws and make sure that there's nothing against this. Make sure that in the state, your nurse can start IVs and do these things. And set up your protocols, your standing orders, and basically get a storefront and put the word out and people come.
It's very important to me. My reputation is extremely important, and I wanted to make sure that we were practicing safe medicine and doing things that were appropriate and not just fly-by-the-night, whatever the flavor of the minute is. That's not how we do it.
And it's been extremely successful. Our first year was, I think, about six months. We did about 90,000 in revenue. And then the first whole year, it was about double that. And then in our second whole year, we're three times, we're like 360,000, I think. So that's additional above and beyond my family medicine practice.
And there's two of us, very little overhead. We pay some rent, we pay licensing and insurance, and then our supplies. So it's extremely rewarding in that regard. And all that revenue is essentially from one location. Kim comes, I have three locations total for my family medicine practice, and she spends one day a week in one of them and doesn't go to the third one at all. So that's essentially in one location.
And it's really been fantastic. I have some notes, other things that we do in that cost center. We do some weight loss, we do hormone replacement therapy. And it's just been a really nice segue outside of the traditional illness-based medicine into wellness. And I really enjoy it. Me, as a medical director of the clinic, I don't do a lot of the hands-on stuff, although I am available.
And if I'm in the office and somebody needs an IV, I can start it and hook it up. But I am the one that follows all the labs. I make recommendations for treatment changes.
Communicate with patients usually via our messaging service. Sometimes I make specific phone calls if people have, they need a high-touch kind of situation. Otherwise, Kim does most of the boots-on-the-ground work, and that works for us.
So we were supposed to sort of focus on different topics here. So who would be good at something like this? I mean, you really do need to be a self-starter. There's a lot of work to be done in the beginning. You can, essentially, there are companies that will help you start it, but you really don't need to do that. But I guess if you want to push the easy button, you can do that.
You have to be able to think outside the box. Like I said, I mean, you can't live inside an insurance-based medicine world where everybody has to take a statin and, for lack of a better description, that's probably the best, in a nutshell, description I can think of. You really can't live in that world and still be okay giving people high-dose vitamin C or a Myers cocktail or glutathione and things like that.
They're just sort of diametrically opposed in philosophy. It helps to have a strong background in chemistry or at least biochemistry and understand how our bodies work and what metabolic processes do and the things that you're trying to support. And I think that's what sets our clinic apart from some others that may not be as interested in their actual patient outcomes.
When you're going to set up something like this, you have to have a clear vision. Being an entrepreneur and owning your own company can really take over your life. There's the potential for a lot of time spent.
So you need a vision of what you want this to look like and you need to set clear boundaries so that you know, hey, do you want to work three days a week, four days a week, nine days a week? Have that picture in your head. What are your hours? Do you have children at home? Are you the primary breadwinner or are you just a secondary breadwinner? All those things matter when you're trying to decide if this is something you can do.
Then you need to set up an LLC so that you have the ability to earn money as a business. And along with that goes picking your name and checking and making sure nobody else has the name. You don't want any copyright infringements or anything like that.
Then you get a domain, build a website, decide on your pricing and you're kind of off and running. Location's really important. We have a brick and mortar location. We've toyed with the idea of getting a mobile van and I mean, that would be fantastic but that didn't fit the vision and the boundaries that we had created in the beginning. Kim has children, I have children, we have lives and driving around chasing a buck didn't seem like the best way for us to do this. So those are all things to take into consideration.
Like I said, it's been a really rewarding experience. We see 10 to 15 patients a day. We could do probably double that and still not need any extra staff. The scheduling and things like that are all electronic and actually it's a shared schedule with my medical practice and the IV clinic and it's cloud-based so you can see it from anywhere. You can see it from your cell phone. We have an app for patients to call and text and that's very responsive.
The technology helps and that makes it a lot easier. We have medical malpractice insurance, insurance for the practice and I mean, everything is just going great. So I hope people have questions.
I could talk longer about like direct primary care and things like that, but it's pretty straightforward.
John: Jen, tell us how you got the capital to start this endeavor.
Dr. Jennifer Allen: I actually borrowed money from myself, New Freedom. My medical practice financed the startup of the Well Infusion Lounge and then the Well paid New Freedom back over a period of time. We didn't start with, it was less than $10,000 and that includes like the furniture, paint, decorations and flooring we did to renovate a space.
It doesn't take much to start this kind of endeavor at all, even my direct care practice. You can start, all you need is a stethoscope and a place to see patients. I bought a building in the beginning so I had a little more of an investment in that regard but as far as the infusion lounge, it was really just the space to do it.
Some IV poles, an account at a medical supply company like Andameds, we can get IV fluids from there, McKesson and then the pharmacies like Empower and Olympia. And that was it.
John: How difficult was it to find suppliers for your infusion center?
Dr. Jennifer Allen: Not really difficult at all. You can Google them and then once you have some names, you can go on Facebook and search for like IV infusion groups and most of the time, as long as you're not a direct competitor down the street, people will give you information.
John: What sort of market footprint do you need in order to start one of these? One of our attendees lives in an area with 100,000 patients. What did your market research tell you about how big an area you needed to support an infusion center?
Dr. Jennifer Allen: So it helps to have kind of a diverse community. Really, we've been successful in a town of 2,000 and then another town of about 15,000. So you don't need a very big area.
You need a reputation and the ability to, word of mouth. So I think people are under the misconception that you need 100,000 or 200,000 or something like that. I in fact think that makes it a little bit harder because you're less known and there may be more competition. So like I said, we've been very successful in relatively small communities.
John: Tell us about the marketing that you did specifically for the infusion center.
Dr. Jennifer Allen: We're kind of cheap and we made a Facebook business page and started telling our friends about it basically and you can post all kinds of free things on Facebook. You can boost a post if you want. We didn't spend, I'm going to say that first six months, we didn't spend $150 on marketing. It was mostly word of mouth, some banners. We just started telling people, hey, this is what we're doing and it took off.
John: Do you get any collaboration or resistance for that matter from the more traditional medical practices or health systems in your locale?
Dr. Jennifer Allen: So it's very interesting. Sometimes I'm surprised. I will get referrals from colleagues in the system and more so lately for our hormone replacement therapy because in the system, they really don't do that.
We get referrals from the oncologists for high dose vitamin C and it's been pretty collegial in that regard. Now there are other, it's still a little bit divided. There are others who have not been supportive and can't possibly understand why I would want to work outside of a traditional hospital-based system. And that's okay, they can think that way but it hasn't been adversarial really in any way.
John: Have you seen any signs of competition in your community for the service yet?
Dr. Jennifer Allen: Not specifically, well, excuse me, I take that back. So there is a chiropractor in the town of about 15,000 who does IV infusion and before we opened, it was actually very interesting timing. We were still in the planning stages and nobody knew.
It wasn't like he'd heard about it from us but he called and asked me to be his medical director and collaborate or be the collaborating physician for the nurse practitioner that he had hired. And I had to politely decline because I was doing my own. So that's, as far as I know, our only competition but we certainly have not lost any patients and we tend to get more again, I think, because we're more of a medical focus. We're really trying to treat symptoms and not just throw hormones at people.
John: That's a powerful and inspirational story. Thank you. And here we are at the top of the minute mark.
Dr. Jennifer Allen: John, you have anything else to add?
John: No, I think that was fantastic. It's inspirational. I think a lot of these presentations will have as much inspiration as actual, nuts and bolts of how to do things. So I really appreciate you sharing your story with us, Jennifer, that was really good.
Dr. Jennifer Allen: Thank you very much, my pleasure.
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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 435
How Direct Primary Care Leads To Unexpected Income Opportunities
- Summit Lecture with Dr. Jennifer Allen
John: Dr. Jennifer Allen has a couple of things she can tell us about. And actually she started as a nurse, then she was a family nurse practitioner. Now she's a family physician. And not only does she run her own DPC or direct primary care, I guess is the vernacular. And she can tell us a little bit about that, but she's also a co-owner and partner of the Well Infusion Lounge, which I had no idea what an infusion lounge even was until we had a little podcast interview a while back. So she's going to tell us her story and how this all came to pass and particularly try and fill us in from the doctor's perspective on this idea of an infusion lounge or an infusion center and what those terms mean. And so with that, I will turn it over to you, Dr. Allen.
Dr. Jennifer Allen: John, thank you very much. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me tonight. As John mentioned, I'm a family physician. I'm board certified in family medicine and I've been in practice almost 10 years since residency. When I was a nurse and a nurse practitioner, I had the great fortune to do what we all do in healthcare and help people along the way.
But because I've been doing this for so long, I have seen the change in healthcare and I knew what I was getting into when I went to medical school. But the reality of how difficult the system makes it for us to do our work and feel fulfilled by that really made me look for some different approaches, I guess, to healthcare. And somewhere along the way, I learned about direct primary care, which is simply a different payment model where your patient pays the doctor directly and we don't bill health insurance for that.
And so I learned about that. I thought it was a great idea. I remember actually having this aha moment where I thought, hey, these are my people, because it made so much sense to cut out the middleman, be able to practice in a custom way, in a way that my patients needed.
And then by doing that, making healthcare more affordable. So that's sort of how my journey began into an alternative type of medical practice. Now, I still practice regular medicine.
It's just that my payment model is different and that's an important distinction. So I came out of residency like so many of us do and walked into a guaranteed position and really thought that I was going to be able to be the doctor that I always wanted to be.
And I think it took, I don't know, three weeks, maybe four, for me to realize that, again, this is the system that I was in before.
It wasn't conducive to me really taking care of people and figuring out what was wrong with them and helping people feel better. I felt like I was a tool, really, of big pharma and a tool of the insurance companies. And I just, once you have seen the light in another way, I just couldn't do that.
I really couldn't do it. And it was slowly sucking the life out of me. So I started fantasizing about what it would take to open my own practice and could I really do this direct primary care thing?
And the reality was, the burdens at work continued to build up. And there were a couple of things that happened. One in particular was I had a cash pay patient who needed a trigger point injection.
I went to my office manager to ask her how much was this going to cost for this cash pay patient? And it took her, I don't know, 45 minutes to come back with a number. And she quoted like $256, which for this single mom who had a trigger point and was going to cost me about 32 cents worth of medication in five minutes of my time, $257 might as well have been $2,000.
So what that taught me was, one, never go to the office manager for cash prices when I could just have done the procedure and not even told them and it would have been fine. But that really showed me that I could not continue to practice inside a system that was so bloated and so just not concerned with people feeling better. And so I took steps to do direct primary care.
So about 15 months into a 36 month contract, I went to the board at the hospital and requested to get my license back, which is something that people don't realize when you join a system, they own your license. You can't do anything else while you're employed. And because this was in a small town, and the president of the hospital was knowledgeable enough to recognize that he needed me to stay in the community to be able to feed his hospital, regardless of whether he owned me or not.
He was instrumental in having them void my non-compete so that I could go practice medicine down the street from the hospital in the model of direct primary care. They didn't want me to bill insurance at all. And I was like, okay, because I'm not going to.
And so I was able to open my practice there and started building. And so this segues into the IV infusion lounge, because once you step out of a system and start learning about free market medicine, entrepreneurship, ways to earn more money without necessarily working harder, you start finding out that there's a whole world out there of healthcare that we have not been taught about and are typically not privy to when you're still inside the system. So as a direct primary care doctor, I'm building this practice.
And when you're outside of the system, you tend to attract patients who don't do well in the system either. So either people who don't like the restrictions of health insurance or can't afford health insurance or are just seeking alternative knowledge or alternative information or implementation of healthcare supplements and things like that. And so there's a pretty steep learning curve if you're not in that kind of mindset or functional environment where you're trying to get to the root cause of things.
Now, not everybody in direct primary care has to practice functional medicine or root cause analysis. That just happens to be my personal preference. That's just how I think.
I want to know why something's happening and I want to fix the why. So that's me. But I have plenty of colleagues, plenty of friends who still practice what I would say is more traditional guideline-directed medicine, treating chronic disease and not necessarily focusing on wellness and prevention.
That said, when you have a practice like mine where the patients at times are more knowledgeable about supplements, how to heal with nutrition and things like that, that really pushed me to go learn some more. And so I've been working on my functional medicine certification. It's a long process, there's a lot of information.
But along the way then you have people who start requesting other services. And I had a lot of patients, this was during COVID. I opened my second location right smack dab at the beginning of COVID in 2020, my first location in 2017.
And so people were seeking alternative methods and in order to grow and learn, you have to think outside the box. And so I started looking into vitamin infusions and things like that. And I discovered that there's not a lot of traditional evidence that is research-based, again, like inside the system that we use to filter our information.
But if you go outside of that, IV vitamins and IV nutrition has actually been around for a hundred years. And using nutraceuticals and herbs and things like that, that's the way we did it before commercial industrialized medicine came into play. And so there's a huge bucket of people out there who prefer those newer old methods.
And again, there's a learning curve. So I learned about that, it seemed to make a lot of sense. And during COVID, we had this huge need for people who just needed to be supported with hydration or with some basic vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin D, things like that.
So it really was a great setup for this kind of practice. And basically, I mean, from a business perspective, the reason that we opened the IV infusion center was to keep the cost center separate from the family medicine practice, because it is very different. And in a membership practice, I bundle a lot of things, a lot of care into the membership.
I don't nickel and dime people to death. So I wanted a place where I could have that revenue stream that would be legitimately outside of the membership. From a business perspective, that was really important.
And so I formed a new LLC, and we created the IV infusion center. My co-founder is a nurse, and she had worked in the IV infusion world before. And so she knew all the protocols and had access to that information.
And so together, we continue to learn and dig deep and check on dosing and storage requirements and things for different vitamins. And there are several large commercial pharmacies in the nation who you can order supplies from. And they're FDA-approved compounding pharmacies.
They use legitimate techniques. They're highly regulated. It's all very safe. And so we formed this partnership, and you check your local laws and make sure that there's nothing against this. Make sure that in the state, your nurse can start IVs and do these things. And set up your protocols, your standing orders, and basically get a storefront and put the word out and people come.
It's very important to me. My reputation is extremely important, and I wanted to make sure that we were practicing safe medicine and doing things that were appropriate and not just fly-by-the-night, whatever the flavor of the minute is. That's not how we do it.
And it's been extremely successful. Our first year was, I think, about six months. We did about 90,000 in revenue. And then the first whole year, it was about double that. And then in our second whole year, we're three times, we're like 360,000, I think. So that's additional above and beyond my family medicine practice.
And there's two of us, very little overhead. We pay some rent, we pay licensing and insurance, and then our supplies. So it's extremely rewarding in that regard. And all that revenue is essentially from one location. Kim comes, I have three locations total for my family medicine practice, and she spends one day a week in one of them and doesn't go to the third one at all. So that's essentially in one location.
And it's really been fantastic. I have some notes, other things that we do in that cost center. We do some weight loss, we do hormone replacement therapy. And it's just been a really nice segue outside of the traditional illness-based medicine into wellness. And I really enjoy it. Me, as a medical director of the clinic, I don't do a lot of the hands-on stuff, although I am available.
And if I'm in the office and somebody needs an IV, I can start it and hook it up. But I am the one that follows all the labs. I make recommendations for treatment changes.
Communicate with patients usually via our messaging service. Sometimes I make specific phone calls if people have, they need a high-touch kind of situation. Otherwise, Kim does most of the boots-on-the-ground work, and that works for us.
So we were supposed to sort of focus on different topics here. So who would be good at something like this? I mean, you really do need to be a self-starter. There's a lot of work to be done in the beginning. You can, essentially, there are companies that will help you start it, but you really don't need to do that. But I guess if you want to push the easy button, you can do that.
You have to be able to think outside the box. Like I said, I mean, you can't live inside an insurance-based medicine world where everybody has to take a statin and, for lack of a better description, that's probably the best, in a nutshell, description I can think of. You really can't live in that world and still be okay giving people high-dose vitamin C or a Myers cocktail or glutathione and things like that.
They're just sort of diametrically opposed in philosophy. It helps to have a strong background in chemistry or at least biochemistry and understand how our bodies work and what metabolic processes do and the things that you're trying to support. And I think that's what sets our clinic apart from some others that may not be as interested in their actual patient outcomes.
When you're going to set up something like this, you have to have a clear vision. Being an entrepreneur and owning your own company can really take over your life. There's the potential for a lot of time spent.
So you need a vision of what you want this to look like and you need to set clear boundaries so that you know, hey, do you want to work three days a week, four days a week, nine days a week? Have that picture in your head. What are your hours? Do you have children at home? Are you the primary breadwinner or are you just a secondary breadwinner? All those things matter when you're trying to decide if this is something you can do.
Then you need to set up an LLC so that you have the ability to earn money as a business. And along with that goes picking your name and checking and making sure nobody else has the name. You don't want any copyright infringements or anything like that.
Then you get a domain, build a website, decide on your pricing and you're kind of off and running. Location's really important. We have a brick and mortar location. We've toyed with the idea of getting a mobile van and I mean, that would be fantastic but that didn't fit the vision and the boundaries that we had created in the beginning. Kim has children, I have children, we have lives and driving around chasing a buck didn't seem like the best way for us to do this. So those are all things to take into consideration.
Like I said, it's been a really rewarding experience. We see 10 to 15 patients a day. We could do probably double that and still not need any extra staff. The scheduling and things like that are all electronic and actually it's a shared schedule with my medical practice and the IV clinic and it's cloud-based so you can see it from anywhere. You can see it from your cell phone. We have an app for patients to call and text and that's very responsive.
The technology helps and that makes it a lot easier. We have medical malpractice insurance, insurance for the practice and I mean, everything is just going great. So I hope people have questions.
I could talk longer about like direct primary care and things like that, but it's pretty straightforward.
John: Jen, tell us how you got the capital to start this endeavor.
Dr. Jennifer Allen: I actually borrowed money from myself, New Freedom. My medical practice financed the startup of the Well Infusion Lounge and then the Well paid New Freedom back over a period of time. We didn't start with, it was less than $10,000 and that includes like the furniture, paint, decorations and flooring we did to renovate a space.
It doesn't take much to start this kind of endeavor at all, even my direct care practice. You can start, all you need is a stethoscope and a place to see patients. I bought a building in the beginning so I had a little more of an investment in that regard but as far as the infusion lounge, it was really just the space to do it.
Some IV poles, an account at a medical supply company like Andameds, we can get IV fluids from there, McKesson and then the pharmacies like Empower and Olympia. And that was it.
John: How difficult was it to find suppliers for your infusion center?
Dr. Jennifer Allen: Not really difficult at all. You can Google them and then once you have some names, you can go on Facebook and search for like IV infusion groups and most of the time, as long as you're not a direct competitor down the street, people will give you information.
John: What sort of market footprint do you need in order to start one of these? One of our attendees lives in an area with 100,000 patients. What did your market research tell you about how big an area you needed to support an infusion center?
Dr. Jennifer Allen: So it helps to have kind of a diverse community. Really, we've been successful in a town of 2,000 and then another town of about 15,000. So you don't need a very big area.
You need a reputation and the ability to, word of mouth. So I think people are under the misconception that you need 100,000 or 200,000 or something like that. I in fact think that makes it a little bit harder because you're less known and there may be more competition. So like I said, we've been very successful in relatively small communities.
John: Tell us about the marketing that you did specifically for the infusion center.
Dr. Jennifer Allen: We're kind of cheap and we made a Facebook business page and started telling our friends about it basically and you can post all kinds of free things on Facebook. You can boost a post if you want. We didn't spend, I'm going to say that first six months, we didn't spend $150 on marketing. It was mostly word of mouth, some banners. We just started telling people, hey, this is what we're doing and it took off.
John: Do you get any collaboration or resistance for that matter from the more traditional medical practices or health systems in your locale?
Dr. Jennifer Allen: So it's very interesting. Sometimes I'm surprised. I will get referrals from colleagues in the system and more so lately for our hormone replacement therapy because in the system, they really don't do that.
We get referrals from the oncologists for high dose vitamin C and it's been pretty collegial in that regard. Now there are other, it's still a little bit divided. There are others who have not been supportive and can't possibly understand why I would want to work outside of a traditional hospital-based system. And that's okay, they can think that way but it hasn't been adversarial really in any way.
John: Have you seen any signs of competition in your community for the service yet?
Dr. Jennifer Allen: Not specifically, well, excuse me, I take that back. So there is a chiropractor in the town of about 15,000 who does IV infusion and before we opened, it was actually very interesting timing. We were still in the planning stages and nobody knew.
It wasn't like he'd heard about it from us but he called and asked me to be his medical director and collaborate or be the collaborating physician for the nurse practitioner that he had hired. And I had to politely decline because I was doing my own. So that's, as far as I know, our only competition but we certainly have not lost any patients and we tend to get more again, I think, because we're more of a medical focus. We're really trying to treat symptoms and not just throw hormones at people.
John: That's a powerful and inspirational story. Thank you. And here we are at the top of the minute mark.
Dr. Jennifer Allen: John, you have anything else to add?
John: No, I think that was fantastic. It's inspirational. I think a lot of these presentations will have as much inspiration as actual, nuts and bolts of how to do things. So I really appreciate you sharing your story with us, Jennifer, that was really good.
Dr. Jennifer Allen: Thank you very much, my pleasure.
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